An early assessment by SQW found six British Business Bank regional funds made 951 investments and drew £233 million of private money by September 2025. The evidence shows who gets first institutional money, and little yet on what follows.

SEIS raised a record 276 million pounds in 2024-25 while EIS plateaued and VCT relief fell to 20 per cent. This is what is confirmed about the 28 October Budget, and what UK founders can ask before it.

A 2026 RBC and Campden Wealth survey found that 47 per cent of attempted fund exits stalled. This Open Question asks what that means for family offices as patient capital, and for UK founders raising from them.

Every week this publication covers another piece of UK market infrastructure edging tokenisation from pilot toward permanence, a sandbox settlement, a feedback statement, a new PISCES admission. Almost none of it touches the part of the UK's startup finance system that most badly needs a liquidity answer: the earliest, smallest, highest risk shareholdings created under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme. SEIS is the most generous tax incentive available to any investor

Family offices are moving earlier into venture but wait 15 to 16 years for cash. Startups are the stage where secondary liquidity can be designed in from the start.

Tokenised startup equity combined with PISCES, whose FCA rules were published on 10 June 2025, could give family offices a controlled way to sell part of a stake before a company is sold or listed. SEIS holding rules still set the pace.

British Business Bank research published on 29 September 2026 finds UK venture capital funds returning as much as US funds overall, and more among recent funds. The catch is that much of the recent gain has not yet been paid out in cash.

The bank keeps the customer, the account and the conversion back into ordinary currency. The blockchain sits underneath, out of sight.

Crowdcube says £543 million of secondary share sales are in its PISCES pipeline, a figure it says could reach £750 million across 29 listings.

More UK companies raised equity for the first time outside London than inside it in the first half of 2026, according to Beauhurst research.

The milestone combines public and private money. The fund's own capital accounts for 44 million pounds of it, which tells a founder more about what is still available than the headline does.

ARK has put an existing closed-end fund onchain without changing the terms on which investors can get their money out. For anyone weighing a tokenised fund structure, the repurchase rules matter more than the blockchain.

Veremark has opened a £6 million share sale on the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, letting staff and early backers sell vested shares.

The East of England has plenty of ideas. What it has lacked, compared with its output, is its fair share of investment. On 23 September 2026, the British Business Bank launched the East of England Investment Fund, a £140 million fund for small and medium-sized businesses across Essex, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. The fund will provide loans of between £25,000 and £2 million, alongside equity investments of up to £5 million. The launch matters beca

Project Ventures, a solo GP fund backed mostly by Imperial College London alumni, reached a £1.2m first close on 21 September 2026 towards a £5m target, writing £100,000 to £300,000 cheques into deeptech and AI founders.

UniCredit is shopping for a technology partner to build digital asset custody and brokerage infrastructure, a move that would let one of Italy's largest banks hold and trade crypto and tokenised instruments directly for wealth clients in Italy, Germany and Austria.

A year on, PISCES has hosted at least six auctions across five companies on four approved venues, thinner on volume than hoped but wider than it looks.

AMC Entertainment chief executive Adam Aron has demanded that Robinhood immediately stop issuing tokens tracking AMC's share price, escalating a public dispute that puts a sharp UK relevant question on the table: what happens to tokenised equity when the underlying issuer never agreed to it.

While public software stocks have taken a beating and social feeds have spent six weeks declaring a SaaSpocalypse, one UK seed investor's own portfolio numbers tell a calmer story about what is actually happening inside early stage software companies.

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to invest in tZero's latest financing round and named the tokenisation firm a design partner for a new NYSE affiliated tokenised securities platform, in one of the clearest signals yet that mainstream exchange o